First look in the mirror, Mr. President, to quell America’s deadly violence

Three of the Walmart workers, Melisa Gonzalez, Jesus Romero and Raven Ramos, who helped people to escape during a mass shooting occurred on Saturday, get emotional during a vigil at Ponder Park in honor to the victims in El Paso on Sunday, August 4, 2019. Lola Gomez/American-Statesman.
By Jesse Jackson 
Trump must lead the way with action in the passage of tough, meaningful gun control and an immediate ban on military-style weapons.

The horrifying and heartbreaking news of the domestic terrorist attacks in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, in less than 24 hours over the weekend reached me while I was in Poland, a country haunted by the deadly power of politically irresponsible and racist rhetoric.

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I was participating in a series of events commemorating the 75th anniversary of the mass murder at Auschwitz-Birkenau death factory near Krakow, where in one night the Nazis killed more than 4,000 Roma and Sinti men, women and children, classified and persecuted by the Nazis as “Gypsies,” aliens, undocumented and other.

The motivation of the young white killer in Dayton is unclear.

But in El Paso, a 21-year-old white man apparently posted to social media a hate-filled, anti-immigrant rant before driving nine hours and 600 miles from the Dallas area to a Walmart, where you can see Mexico from the parking lot, to kill as many brown-skinned people as possible .
Wielding a semiautomatic, military-style rife — a weapon of mass destruction — the Texas shooter killed 20 people and wounded dozens more in a matter of minutes. The death toll in the El Paso shooting now stands at 22.

The scourge of homegrown racial terrorism is not new.

Since the birth of the Klan during Reconstruction, to the White Citizen’s councils of the ‘60s to Timothy McVeigh’s slaughter of 168 people, including 19 children, in Oklahoma City, the radical and racist right has used guns and bombs to intimidate and spread fear.


President Donald Trump said many of the right things at the White House Monday morning in condemning the shootings, racism, bigotry and white supremacy.

Better late than never. Now he must do the right thing. He can start by looking at the man in the mirror. He must end his use of racially charged (often racist) rhetoric and tweets for political gain. It is divisive, dangerous and diversionary.

I think he is better than that. I know the country is.

The president should also clean the swamp inside his administration.

During his campaign and in the White House — the people’s house — Trump has surrounded himself with racial ideologues, including his immigrant-bashing speech writer Stephen Miller, a close college friend of Richard Spencer, who, along with former KKK leader and Trump endorser, David Duke, were organizers of the demonstrations in Charlottesville where hundreds of neo-Nazis marched through the streets, chanting, “Jews will not replace us.”

Racism is a pathology. It is unscientific. It is immoral. It is a sickness. It is deadly.

The ideology of white supremacy is spewing hate, anti-immigrant and racially polarizing rhetoric. It is cannon fodder for these mass killings. These are not killings of passion, but political killings. Calling the shooters mentally ill is dismissing their plan of action, their ideology of supremacy and hate.

They are at war. They know what they’re doing and why.

We have a gun crisis, a hate crisis and a leadership crisis.

Trump must use his bully pulpit for something more than bullying. He must lead the way with action, not just words, in the passage of tough, meaningful gun control and an immediate ban on the military-style weapons used by both killers in El Paso and Dayton.

He must demand his fellow Republicans do the same. The House has passed gun legislation that would likely reduce such mass killings in the future, but Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has refused to bring it before the Senate for a vote.

Mr. President, start twisting arms. These political acts of domestic terrorism are an attempt to undercut our democracy. The combination of well-armed white nationalists and white supremacists, and a multiracial democracy, cannot co-exist.

The president must take a moral stand for humanity and curb his ugly rhetoric.

His FBI must clamp down on right-wing, white nationalist groups inspiring and committing these acts of violence. He must join the American people who are demanding sensible gun safety measures.

Prayers and condolences are not enough.

We need action. We need gun control. We need the political will and moral leadership to stop the violence, save the children — and the country.
Jesse Jackson
Glad you are back  Jesse .
The  PIC's

Life and Death of Jeffrey Epstein

 

 

 

 

A changed and aged Epstein during incarceration

 

Jeffry Epstein is dead by his own hand and the conspiracy theories abound. Of course they should be thoroughly investigated, even though they are all more fiction than fact. The system or someone in it is responsible for leaving a suicidal man unsupervised and should step forward and own it.

Will  anyone truly mourn Epstein's death??

 

One of Epstein's accusers

 

some of Epstein's victims

 

The more we learn, the more Jeffrey Epstein resembles an evil comic book character for the developmentally arrested, pseudo intellectual — the charming-but-lurid mastermind with a plot to take over the world by impregnating scores of women on a remote desert estate.

 The New York Times reported that the financier/convicted sex offender/philanthropist — and  accused sex trafficker — was also a “transhumanist” who had big plans for humankind. Epstein apparently told one scientist that he hoped to seed the human race with his own DNA by impregnating 20 women at a time at his New Mexico ranch, named “Zorro.”

 

Transhumanism is the theory that the human population can be enhanced through technologies such as artificial intelligence and genetic engineering. Or eugenics by any other name. Epstein seems to have believed that he was that rare breed that ought to be replicated.

 

The carriers of Epstein’s apparently rarefied spermatozoa wouldn’t be the younger, underage sexual partners he allegedly preferred. Instead, according to the Times’s reporting, his maternal incubators would be adult women whose intellectual qualifications would have been established through academic achievement.

 

Trump parties at Epstein's Manhattan manse

 

For dinners he hosted at his Manhattan manse, Epstein often invited scientists as well as a sampling of attractive, accomplished women. Some of the scientists theorized that the women were being vetted as potential candidates for Epstein’s very special black book, according to the Times.

 

The male invitees weren’t your run-of-the-mill scientists but some of the most renowned, innovative minds in research and academia. Among them was Steven Pinker , the Harvard cognitive psychologist and popular science author, who seems to have seen through Epstein, calling him an “intellectual impostor.” Pinker told the Times that Epstein would abruptly shift topics and make juvenile remarks. To the layman’s eye, such behavior suggests a purposeful deflection when the topic at hand is reaching a point beyond the speaker’s comfort range or intellectual capacity.

 

Others on Epstein’s guest lists apparently were seduced by his charm and intellect, as well as his wealth, which he reportedly dangled as bait for funding-starved researchers. He was generous, often donating to a variety of interests and causes, including the Clinton Foundation. But he wasn’t convinced that helping the starving masses was productive in the right sense, arguing that providing food and health care to the poor would only heighten the risk of overpopulation.

 

Pinker, who said he was present when Epstein floated this idea at a gathering at Harvard, which was dissented, arguing that the evidence points to the contrary. Gods don’t like to be contradicted, and Pinker was thereafter told he’d been “voted off the island” and banished from future gatherings.

Speaking of which, Epstein’s private island in the Caribbean — which he dubbed “Little St. Jeff’s” — is of renewed interest thanks to an NBC News report. Apparently, a blue-and-white-striped, block-shaped building on it bears no resemblance to the octagonally shaped design that had been approved to be a music hall, according to permit records.

 

What the structure does resemble, however, is a pharaoh’s headdress. Might this have been intended as a mausoleum for Epstein’s remains? That is, other than his head and penis, which he reportedly wished to have frozen. Also a fan of cryogenics, believing that frozen human parts and bodies could be resurrected in the future, Epstein was no ordinary bloke. Indeed, he is a perversely tragic figure.

 

Burdened with lewd and improbable fantasies and the means to explore them, it seems that Epstein became lost in his own fable. Wandering the skies in his private jet, enamored of his own mind and image, he forgot that he was merely mortal and may have flown too close to the sun. Confined to a jail cell (with further punishment to come) — and removed from his luxurious kingdom, his freedom and the company of luminaries who swelled his ego with admiration — his suffering must have been unbearable, although richly deserved. The logical explanation for his extreme reaction to his situation is that he could no longer tolerate what his life had sunk to and did not have the courage to face an even worse future.

 

Nailed it !